The truth is out there somewhere and with the Big Foot Press Conference today we will hopefully know the results of the DNA findings. Multiple tests are being carried out and will be announced. What happens if the Bigfoot story is confirmed as true ? What happens if the story is false? Will there be […]
Google is doing some strange things, for eg yesterday we ranked No.1 in the .com for “Liz Taylor Murdered” now the page in the serps is at….wait for it no.63. Perhaps other blogs are much better and more specific, or give more valued information. How is Google discerning the ranking positions ? One day […]
Yes that’s right it’s already the 2nd anniversary of the Microsoft adCenter launch in the UK. The mighty Microsoft gave life to the adCenter search Ads 2 years ago today.
One thing you can say about Microsoft is they always support any product launch fully, dedicated teams located in London, Dublin and Liverpool focus […]
Yet more link bait this week ? Throughout the course of the last week we have been picking up on stories which may be true or false. This one is “Liz Taylor Murdered” and seems to have been started by E-mail spammers as if it has come from msnbc.com news. The breaking news headline claims […]
searchingforbigfoot.com .. HAHAHA if you are going to linkbait at least make sure you have you have enough bandwidth,, 
Ok so I’ve run most of my guest posts, I still have two or three to run, but they won’t be going live until after SES San Jose. So what did you think? Like em? Dislike em?
Share your feelings in the comments. Constructive criticism is fine, being a dufus troll is not. if you […]
I got mentioned in the media 3 or 4 times last week and just finished my last interview (at least for a while). It is hard when you get used to doing interviews with friends or talking to the media because it is easy to be unprepared for the other. With reporters you have to be guarded because they often aim for a misquote because that sounds more interesting, whereas you can be really open with friends.
Anita Campbell recently interviewed me about SEO and business stuff on the Open Forum, and Augusto Ellacuriaga interviewed me about SEO on his Spanish SEO blog.
Kim Krause Berg recently interviewed Sugarrae.
In Leonard Klaatu’s article about Bassackwards Business Model he mentioned me a bunch, but did not interview me…he didn’t need to though as I think he understood my philosophy and strategy, perhaps better than I do.
On Search Engine Land I wrote tips on how to rank a new site quickly.
If you are going to SES please support Todd Malicoat’s IM Charity Party on the 18th. I won’t be attending SES, but I should be at the IM Charity Party for an hour or two.
David Mihm did a great rundown of SMX local and mobile.
Microsoft Live Search upgraded their webmaster tools, so if you want to dig into details but were afraid to give Google any more data this is a great opportunity. Rand recently interviewed Live’s Nathan Buggia.
Amazon’s Mechanical Turk fully launched. It has to be good for a lot of creative publishing ideas…the most obvious are spamming opportunities, but I have not tested the upper limit of quality yet. Have you?
Google is showing more data about when and how they customize and personalize search results…claiming greater transparency. Meanwhile, they have begun blocking some automated rank checkers and sending bad data to users of their API.
Zappos is practicing the ugly anti-marketing art of line extension, by selling laptops. Did you know that before ketchup Heinz was a leader in the pickles market?
Google claims it hasn’t made significant changes to its mapping software. Yet local data for the Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia is not appearing. This is in sharp contrast to Google Earth which supplies local data down to building levels. (They must have the data then?)Microsoft again is the winner here with its Virtual Earth product […]
Don’t ask us why we were looking for an Aston Martin. But something rather critical about the Aston Martin PPC campaign caught our attention, in-fact we have witnessed the campaign error for the best part of a week.
A search for “Aston Martin” in Google brings us the following ad:
When we click on this ad this […]
Searching is not always done through the net. Yes, there is a physical world out there too. Many have spent their lives searching for Bigfoot. Perhaps once thought a mythical beast it seems Georgia may have indeed found the mighty Bigfoot. Is this yet another example of link bait ? Well, Google trends […]
The following is a Guest Post from Joe Hall.
The internet is changing the real estate industry on a daily basis. And, not surprisingly, it’s the Web 2.0 innovators that are leading the revolution. Of course this isn’t the first time that new media gurus have redefined an industry. However, this time around old school brands […]
One of the difficult things of trying to share ideas, or teach a concept to large group of people is the different levels everyone is at. What some people consider advanced others consider intermediate. The second problem is the larger and more diverse the audience, the more general and ambiguous the examples have to be.
Ask […]
Last week Giovanni Gallucci sent me a link to Viewzi which has some interesting search UI’s that I think advanced users might actually use. Unlike Cuil I don’t think they spent 30 million and ended up with a product that thinks the best picture for me is a picture of Elliot Spitzer.
One of the search […]
I just got done talking with a pretty sharp reporter about some SEO stuff. He had done far more research than most reporters I talk to, but still had one big misconception about the field of SEO…thinking it was largely about mechanical processes, hidden text, and other such tricks.
Market research, site structure, and on page optimization are important. Doing them well can double or triple the earnings of a site, but when you get into the big fields where people are deeply passionate or interested links are needed to win. And those links are often a reflection of our emotions.
When you look at your site do you find anything that is emotionally engaging? enraging?
As the web gets more efficient and search engines gather more data, those who evoke emotional responses will keep gaining marketshare while bland webmasters fall quietly into the abyss.
This totally freaked me out today, I was signed into my Gmail account and was going to check the adsense test we had been running, which isn’t connected to my Gmail account so I normally have to logout and sign in has Becky my wife ( it’s her account lol ), but to my surprise […]
Many moons ago I wrote about how short videos are better than long ones, and I took lumps in the comments because I didn’t do a good job explaining myself and some readers took me far to literally. However I came across a video last week that allows me to explain myself a little better.
I […]
The following is a Guest Post from Amber Benedict.
A client of mine emailed me in a panic, saying two of their affiliate PPC sites have been “tagged” by Google Adwords for violation of the Google double serving policy. “Tagged” meaning that Google is planning to take down my clients’ paid ads for violation of the […]
On Sitepoint Clinton Lee wrote a 6 page high quality web site valuation guide.
The New York Times recently published a great article about flipping websites, quoting my buddy Peter Davis.
Shane Pike recently blogged about selling one of his sites to Internet Brands. The site he sold was the one that let him quit his job. I gave him some tips on how to build traffic and increase monetization during a 15 minute chat at Elite Retreat in December of 2006. He quickly took my advice to heart and is a richer man for it. Here is his revenue graph from that site
But where he really made a killing was when he found investment bankers to help him sell on a nice multiple of that
If you believe your site could sell for more than $100,000, you’re throwing money away if you don’t use an experienced broker or investment banking firm to help you sell it. Because they’re much more adept than you at running an efficient process, finding potential buyers, and maximizing the bids from those buyers, they make up their fee many times over.
For example, this whole process started when I received an unsolicited bid for the site. Before all was said and done, though, my representatives had secured not just one, but two final bids that were ten times that initial offer. I couldn’t have gotten half that on my own.
Because of the low cost of online distribution a company can quickly grow from being one of your affiliates, to one of your leading sales channels, to being the leading competitor. And once they grow into a destination you can’t just cut them off without hurting your customers or your brand, as Ryanair will soon find out.
The strategy of starting off with a harmless consumer focused service that can spread far and wide is what allowed Google to create a system where its leading competitors paid Google to market the Google brand across the leading web properties. It is the same set up that benefits new bloggers…most companies don’t see them as competitors until after they dominate the market.
In a recent interview Microsoft’s Brad Goldberg said:
Today, if you look at search behavior, search actually isn’t good around verticals. In many respects it is not in the economic interest of a lot of vertical sites to expose more and more of their content to search engines because then they risk being aggregated in terms of traffic.
At some point Google will reach a logical upper limit. Google OneBox is encroaching on many large verticals, and Google merchant search is not far behind.
At the other end of the spectrum many marketing offers to help you get traffic cheaper than you can get it from Google, but only at the expense of creating competition for you subsidized by your own pocketbook! Years ago Article Insider was selling traffic for pennies a click, but you had to buy years worth of clicks upfront, and then when they published your content the clicks you were buying were below the fold while they placed Google AdSense ads above the fold - so if you wanted real exposure you were stuck paying Google anyhow. More recently John Andrews pointed out a new Marchex strategy where publishers pay Marchex to develop a domain name that offers them low cost traffic, at least temporarily.
By “partnering” with Marchex, these small business men have handed over a portion of their web presence to a company that has invested heavily in their own market. Marchex acquired — and prepped for local business success — a collection of domains like DentalCareIssaquah.com. Today that domain is offered to this dental practice, but tomorrow when they stop paying Marchex’s preferred rate, that domain will indeed be offered to the next bidder. Thanks to Issaqua Dental’s continuing investment in Marchex, that hyperlocal domain owned by Marches has increasing asset value in that local market. Clearly Marchex is a competitor. What a great business strategy! Compete with local small businesses while marketing yourself as their partner, collecting a share of their revenues!
If you are going to make a big online marketing investment make sure your site has reached the point of diminishing returns before looking elsewhere. And make sure that when you look elsewhere you are not diminishing your longterm returns by subsidizing a new market competitor.
It is fun to watch Tamar Weinberg and John Andrews write about social media. Largely because they are both firm in their beliefs, and they believe polar opposites. Tamar’s piece covering the definition of social media marketers is uplifting and paints social media as friendships to be won rather than games to be played and people to be fooled. But bots and ad networks are amoral, and they control the production of much of the free content.
John’s view of social media is a bit more cynical - highlighting quotes like this one:
In an age when most major media outlets are providing outrage-of-the-hour content, one should not be surprised that the community built around that is also comprised of illogical, emotionally charged drivel flavored with a smattering of generally useless regurgitated trivia posing as genuine information.
Digg is full of fake profiles, and so is MySpace. Early promoters of social media ask if it is becoming a vast wasteland. But at the core the questions nobody is asking are
Some animals are smart, but assuming a user is real why would they spend hours a day on a general purpose social media site unless they were getting something out of it? Entertainment has value, but trading votes gets old on day #2 (at the latest)! How low must a person value their time (or how poor must their self image and identity be) for them to spend so much time on sites painted by a collage of spam? If they are poor they are probably easy to buy off, so social media is just another way to buy exposure.
The news companies are fighting back against the free content by turning newspapers into something Jerry Springer would write, with a few advertorials sprinkled in to help offset lower ad revenues. A recent survey revealed “Nearly one in five (19 percent) of senior marketers admit their organizations bought ads on a news site in exchange for a news story.”
It is hard to create a destination, become an icon, or build a brand if you are stuck on a large anonymous network. And spending too much time on such a network can warp your perception of reality by showing you the nasty side of anonymity. Add in a bit of desperate attention whoring coupled with endless reams of free recycled content and you have the perfect storm for creating The Tragedy of the Commons.
At best most large social media sites are an Amway-like pyramid scheme. Sure you can count uniques, but what’s the point? Social media sites are a transitory vehicle used by newbies hoping to gain status and recognition, while professionals use them for marketing and link generation. Those who realize the game rarely waste time on social media sites beyond satisfying the criteria needed to manipulate them to achieve their goals.
The only difference between most social media sites and a traditional free for all page is votes. As social network spamming programs get cheaper and bots get smarter look for that difference to narrow.